Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
We’re talking about this moment with Brian Beutler, because he writes regularly on his excellent Substack, Off Message, about the need for Democrats to fight the information wars aggressively. And this Rubio moment raises some important issues related to that. Brian, always good to have you on.
Sargent: OK. So this moment started when Representative Ted Lieu got to question Rubio. First, Lieu played video of Rubio talking at a recent Cabinet meeting with Trump slumbering away right beside him. Then Ted Lieu asked Rubio about that. Listen.
Marco Rubio (voiceover): That’s false. That’s false. I’ve never seen him fall asleep. On the contrary, the guy doesn’t sleep, which is a big problem because he calls me at two in the morning. He calls me at five in the morning. And, you know, I like to sleep a little bit.
Beutler: Part of the reason he’s falling asleep in Cabinet meetings is that he’s this erratic person who is outraged all night, stays up all night tweeting, and then is too exhausted for the work that he actually finds boring—the work of the president that happens during mostly normal business hours.
Sargent: Right. Well, let’s listen to more of the exchange. It continues this way. After Rubio had denied that Trump falls asleep at the meetings, Lieu played more video that showed Trump sleeping away right next to Rubio. And then Lieu said this. Listen.
Rubio (voiceover): I’ve never been at any meeting where he—the things you’re showing me now, he was not falling asleep.
Sargent: Brian, what interests me about this is Rubio’s trying to plead that this is too trivial a matter to be discussed before the Foreign Relations Committee. But Lieu just doesn’t let himself get knocked off course by that. Everything here is all about Trump’s fundamental unfitness for the job, about how he shouldn’t be making these decisions and he shouldn’t have this power and that this is a disaster for America and the world. Your thoughts on that?
And in a more normal context, a president slipping—they’re in office for four years, there’s cameras everywhere. They might trip and fall. They might nod off in one meeting. They might accidentally hit post on a tweet before they finish typing it. And that would be ridiculous to home in on in a Foreign Relations Committee meeting because it is trivial.
His not just—not the fact that he’s old and tired, but the fact that he’s unwell, erratic, susceptible to flattery. These are all part of one thing. And it is a crisis. It is relevant to the work of the Foreign Affairs Committee and multiple other committees of Congress.
Beutler: He has a lot of experience at shape-shifting at this point.
Lieu (voiceover): Donald Trump’s inability to stay awake on the job shows that there’s something very wrong with his health or cognitive abilities. In fact, on a number of occasions, Donald Trump will contradict himself in literally the same meeting or interview.
Lieu (voiceover): So, Secretary Rubio, instead of holding North Korean–style Cabinet meetings where everyone goes around the room kissing Donald Trump’s ass, I’m going to ask you to come clean with the American people and the White House as well. There’s something wrong with Donald Trump’s health or cognitive abilities. There’s a reason he keeps going to the hospital and they keep giving him cognitive tests. We have not seen the president in eight days. The American people deserve the truth. I yield back.
Lieu (voiceover): Just keep lying. Just keep on—
Sargent: So Rubio goes on to spin a bunch of bullshit about how youthful and vigorous and superior to everyone around him Trump is. But the thing is, Brian, what strikes me about this is Rubio’s forced to deny what we can all see as true. And it seems to me Democrats don’t do this kind of hand-to-hand combat enough. They don’t make Republicans deny what’s true about them. They spend—meaning Democrats spend—their time denying Republican lies about them. What do you make of that?
I think Democrats have had a hard time shaking the habit of assuming that what is true will be made clear to people when they watch television or when they read the newspaper, that the mediating institutions will do this work for them. They don’t need to say, hey, why has Donald Trump been to the hospital so many times to take so many cognitive tests? Why is Donald Trump falling asleep in all of his meetings? Does it have something to do with him being up until 3 a.m. tweeting libel all the time?
Sargent: Agreed. And just to broaden out what we’re really talking about here, some people might watch these exchanges and listen to what you and I are saying and conclude, this is just TDS, Trump Derangement Syndrome. They’re just obsessing over Trump. It’s not focused on what people really care about.
But it’s just factual that Trump is the center of our political universe. And it’s precisely when voters forget how unfit he is that he does well, that Republicans do well. It’s when voters understand and see glaringly how unfit he is that he and Republicans lose. What’s your big theory on all this?
And I think that does suggest that there is some balance that you need to strike between trying to make issues and trying to appeal to people on the basis of regular concerns. I never want to overstate the case and say forget about kitchen-table issues, don’t have healthcare plans and stuff. That stuff is important.
Sargent: Trump would absolutely agree with our understanding of how politics works. And here’s why. He runs everything through a strong-versus-weak frame. Everything is about his dominance, his virility, his masculine strength, his big crowds, his big ratings. And everything is always also about how weak his enemies are, how they’re failing, how they get low ratings, how they have low energy.
Beutler: Yeah. I mean, even before Donald Trump kind of took it to this insane level where everything he says about his opponent you can count on to be a lie and abusive and maybe libelous—with the goal being to make them look small and easily squashed like a bug, and he’s the strong person who’s setting the terms of the political argument—Republicans would do this.
And I think in the end of that—this Swift Boat Veterans thing that I’m alluding to from 22 years ago—Kerry found his footing. But it was a perilous moment, because Kerry’s initial inability to stand up for himself was dangerous because people cared less about the attack than they did about the likelihood, the possibility that Kerry would become president and bring this unwillingness to stand up for himself to the office. And if he wouldn’t stand up for himself, how could he stand up for regular people or the country?
You really have to set the terms of the debate yourself. And somewhere after Donald Trump won his first election, I think Democrats lost faith in that, or they lost sight of that insight and they lost their confidence. And things like what Ted Lieu did in the clips you played are the kind of thing that can help bring it back.
Instead, what Republicans want is for Talarico to lie down and take these attacks. That’s the main event they want. They want, again, to go back to the Swift Boat example, for one side to be seen as strong and dominant and the other as weak and submissive and unable to fight back. And these attacks are almost designed to trigger bad instincts in Democrats, I think, in a way. Can you talk about this Texas Senate race example in this context a little bit? You wrote a great piece about this. It’s applicable, isn’t it?
And Republicans certainly want some of those voters to think, well, if you vote for Talarico, that means you’re not a real man. And they want those people’s friends to be saying, you’re not going to vote for that Talarico guy, are you? To create a kind of peer pressure, a social environment where supporting Talarico is something that you have to be ashamed of.
And so, irrespective of the attack—Talarico is trans—I don’t think that they particularly care about the truth or falsity of the accusation. They’re looking to Talarico to see if he’ll take an affront to his identity lying down.
And my hope—I think the best way for Talarico to thread this needle, to address the libel without either throwing trans people under the bus or anchoring the whole campaign around questions of trans rights—would be to take it head-on in that way. Like, you’re going to lie about me? Let’s have it out.
Sargent: Absolutely. So just to close this out, just to go back to this Ted Lieu–Rubio exchange—what’s your general feeling about what Democrats can actually learn from an exchange like this? And what do you want to see them doing? This is something you write about all the time, very well.
Beutler: I guess the through line here is that there’s a lot of political value in putting your opposition in a bind that, at least at a glance, feels impossible. I do want to say that I think Rubio, because Republicans are well versed in this, handled this exchange about as well as is possible if you work in Trump’s administration. And it’s because he understands—don’t get yourself in a bind. Think through what your opposition is likely to throw at you and how you’re going to respond.
And if Democrats on Capitol Hill grilling Republicans before committees can try to keep that binary in mind, then their questions are going to be a lot sharper, a lot better. And there will be people who aren’t quite as adept as Rubio, and they will start to flounder.
Sargent: Brian Beutler, always awesome to talk to you, man. Folks, check out Brian’s Substack, Off Message. Brian, thanks for coming on. Let’s do it again soon.
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